Three teaching things: week of May 9
This week: a paper on teaching critical reflection; an inclusive pedagogy toolkit; and a tool for annotating anywhere on a screen.
Issue #46
1. Making Critical Thinking Skills Training Explicit, Engaging, and Effective through Live Debates on Current Political Issues
I suspect the idea of developing critical thinkers could be as close to a universal skill as there is in higher education, no matter the discipline. How do you teach the skill, though? The authors of this paper report an approach by modelling critical thinking, through 10-minute debates. The preliminary findings of this work suggests that their intervention worked.
The authors (teaching undergraduate Political Science courses) describe their technique: each session included an introduction where instructors “clarified the rules [of the debate]” (p. 156), engaged in the live debate where the instructors “questioned, critiqued, or critically concurred with each other’s ideas” (p. 156) and closed by holding a brief debrief (couldn’t help myself) of the debate, where the instructors “explicitly commented on the lessons (and sometimes the mistakes) from our application of critical thinking skills during our debates” (p. 156). Fun facilitation fact: instructors flipped a coin to decide which side of the debate they’d take.
Beyond the findings described in the paper, I was left thinking more about the classroom approach. I don’t think that live-debates would be as helpful for teaching this skill to, say, a Chemistry student as they were for the Political Science students. But paradoxically, we expect all graduates to engage in critical thinking in their daily lives.
Given the disciplinary nature of the paper, I might offer here that it would be worth considering what critical thinking looks like in practice in your discipline. For Political Science, it can be “seen” through debate.
Reflecting on the classroom technique, my sense is the learning comes from students observing of how critical thinking is “done” in a discipline coupled with the debrief, which makes clear how the skills were applied. That approach (active modelling, immediate debrief) could be applied to any discipline. And kudos to the authors for teaching a skill, rather than expecting that student will learn it though osmosis.
Tao, Y., & Griffith, E. (2020). Making Critical Thinking Skills Training Explicit, Engaging, and Effective through Live Debates on Current Political Issues: A Pilot Pedagogical Experiment. PS: Political Science & Politics, 53(1), 155–160. https://doi.org/10.1017/s104909651900115x
2. Inclusive Pedagogy Toolkit
This toolkit, developed by the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown University (Washington, USA), offers “concrete suggestions for designing inclusive, anti-racist learning environments through five key interconnected aspects of teaching and learning relevant to all courses”: content; pedagogy; assessment; classroom climate and power dynamics.
Each aspect offers a rationale on why a suggested approach matters and offers clear suggestions on how to incorporate the approach into your classroom or practices.
3. DemoPro
This presentation tool for MacOS ($) allows you to easily draw with digital ink on any application or webpage when recording a screen. While the ability to draw could be the selling feature, the tool includes a countdown timer—that you can use for timing breaks or activities.
Three Teaching Things is a weekly newsletter compiled by Gavan Watson, which shares three different teaching and learning resources (papers, resources or tools) worth your attention.
The end of this month will mark the first anniversary of this newsletter. What started as an experiment has grown to a sustained year-long effort. I’ve appreciated the opportunity to write this over the year, but I will be taking a hiatus over the summer months. Not quite sure what that look like yet, but wanted to give you a heads-up to expect a change in frequency of publishing at the end of the month.
Thanks for reading!